He steps outside and realizes he forgot to fold this part.
The sky above him glints like sugar spilled on ink. There are trees here, sharp and twisted things, like nothing on earth. Where is he?
When is he?
How old is he?
How old was she when–
He grabs a branch; his hand comes away bloody, and he smears it across the pages. Names lift from it and float away (Zocco Zion Zinnia Zhenya) but they’re all wrong. What page was it on? Seventeen? Nineteen?
Maybe he shouldn’t ask.
Somewhere a snowskull drifts to earth, ELIOT melting from its brow.
He can place it now, the noise, the low whine rising. Everyone breathing together, said the end of the world. But breathing their first or last?
He flips through his notebook. Even the inside cover is layered in incomprehensibly dense script, black on white on black repeating, but he remembers writing his name first in case he were to lose it. It’s still down there somewhere. Information can be neither created nor destroyed.
What does it take to wash ink from memory? He touches the edge of one page with his still-bleeding finger. The paper sucks hungrily, and then he knows.
His finger aches as he dyes the vellum crimson.
Paper sucks blood away, a capillary hunger he finds it somehow hard to watch, but soon the model is finished. He sets it in place and the light flares green and purple, colors of greed. It’s lapping at him. It is pulling him down.
The auditorium.
He crouches in the aisle, nauseated, feeling like a rough stone in a tumbler from his own graceless travel. But he’s back. He stumbles to his seat to find his notebook, a battered little thing covered in strata of ink.
A sound makes him look up.
If one travels from A to B, there must then exist a route from B to A. He doesn’t care if the world has ended. He doesn’t care if realities overlap. He’s done with this place and he’s going back to where he started: the auditorium, his notes, his work.
She talked about symbols. He tears apart a blank book he found somewhere and folds origami seats, an apron, a proscenium. Purple and green flicker at the edges of his model. The vellum is soft; the velvet curtains, he remembers, were red.
He begins to massage the tip of his finger.
Thursday, February 17, 2011
With shaking hands he finds his cheap ballpoint and field-strips it, fumbling the spring from its barrel and prying it straight as pain until he’s got a sharp point to dig with. The splinter comes free, and blood, as always, follows.
He stares at it for a moment, mind as clumsy as his hands, then sucks it from his fingertip.
He will come to regret the waste.
When he reassembles the pen again it doesn’t work anymore. No matter. He drops it and, unnoticed, a slip of paper from his pocket tumbles down after it to nest between the floorboards.
Thursday, February 10, 2011
His hand catches in limine, and he hesitates, turning to pull his finger free and examine it. There’s a splinter, long and dark, just under the dim translucence of his outermost skin.
He tries to pry it out and succeeds in snapping off the end. Tension mounts his lower back, draws his shoulders together. He sits down to worry at it; each attempt makes the wound a little more raw.
It’s driving him like a trapped animal. He gnaws at his finger, casts about for a needle, whimpers and curses and kicks the wall and why can’t he remember his name
Thursday, January 27, 2011
By the time he steps inside he’s forgotten the number on the sign.
There’s light in the house but he can’t seem to cast a shadow. It’s almost a relief, to stop worrying when your hand will accidentally loose a monster. He ambles without purpose, taking pleasure in exploration: one room floored in knotty pine, another in oak, their walls shaded blue or celadon or tea rose pink. Multiplicity makes his greed for novelty easy. They never cease to provide.
In one of the rooms, he thought he saw stars through a window; but he has already forgotten where that was.
Thursday, January 13, 2011
“I never understood this part,” he says, in darkness. “Shouldn’t we be suffocating in stomach acid now?”
“I told you,” she says, impatient for once, “realities overlap.” Lamplight flickers behind them and he sees that they’re not in a whale’s belly after all: the wall is stone.
He raises his hand. On the wall, it shadows a wolf.
“This place illustrates the trap of sapience: the inability to perceive reality by any other means than the senses.”
“But we’re not chained here,” he says.
“Like the best traps,” says the end of the world, “it lets you believe you are free.”
Tuesday, December 4, 2007